BP Engineer Called Doomed Rig a 'Nightmare Well'

Six days before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP drilling engineer called the rig a "nightmare well" that had caused the company problems in the past.

The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an e-mail April 14. On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion killed 11 people and sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation's worst environmental disaster.

The e-mail was among dozens of internal documents released Monday in Washington by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the explosion and its aftermath. Committee leaders said BP made a series of questionable decisions before the explosion that "posed a trade-off between cost and well safety."